The Preservation of Structures — ‘We must be careful with the tide’: Olivia Louvel’s 'doggerLANDscape'

 

Once upon a time, there was an island that wasn’t. 12,000 years ago, what is now Britain was connected to what is now Germany, the Netherlands, and Denmark via terrain today known as Doggerland. An area of lagoons, lakes, rivers, valleys, and forests, Doggerland was home to mammoths, deer, aurochs, wild pigs, and cattle, providing rich hunting grounds for Mesolithic humans who also lived there. These people may even have built communities rather than leading a nomadic existence, since the abundance of fish provided them with the ability to settle. However, rising sea levels led to Doggerland’s gradual disappearance, with a massive tsunami around 8,200 years ago inundating and destroying much of the area, devastating human life there. A few hundred years later, the last vestiges of Doggerland vanished beneath the North Sea. The story of this lost world inspires reflection about reciprocal and transformative relationships between land and water, humanity and the natural world, and between past, present, and future. Geography affects and influences history and politics, and whilst Doggerland (both as a now non-existent landmass and conceptually) evokes contemporary concerns regarding climate change and rising sea levels, it also provokes pertinent political and sociological questions about identity, union and unity, separation and division.

According to her website, Olivia Louvel is ‘a composer, multidisciplinary artist and researcher’ who has pursued a PhD ‘investigating the interplay of voice and sculpture’. The nature of her work lends itself to themes of connection and the contention that nothing and no one exists in isolation. Given the intimate associations of place and people and the ways in which human lives and feelings are shaped by our environment, Doggerland seems an appropriate subject for Louvel’s talents. She has created a multimedia suite comprising an album and video art, as well as a sound installation inspired by this drowned land. The physicality of landscape indelibly marks us, influencing our life and character, becoming emblematic, fiercely allied with notions of identity, and informing rhetoric. It’s also worth considering how the absence of a topography that once accommodated human communities resonates down the ages to affect our existence today. Louvel’s sound-relief, ‘Doggerland Channels’ (2022), uses multimedia, connecting sound and vision to stimulate a re-experiencing and consideration of what has been lost. At the centre of the work, a nexus of ancient fluvial systems reappears, seeming to flow from a nucleus in the North Sea, which looks at the viewer like a giant eye, signalling our bodily relationship with topography.

Louvel’s work on and about Doggerland provides a comprehensive and immersive experience, an intersensory project representing many kinds of dialogues: between artist and beholder or listener, between the senses, between land and peoples, and between time periods. Her ‘doggerLANDscape’ video art (2023) documents Louvel’s own journey to find physical remnants of the past at Wolla Bank. Images of ancient submerged trees, relics of a once-great forest, are matched with music that is a perfect and poignant accompaniment to the washed-out, glassy greys and browns that represent the vestiges of a lost, antediluvian world. The tracks selected from the album, ‘We Are One Land’ and ‘On The Shoreline On That Day’, both seem designed to invite participation and identification with place, time, and each other. In the first track, Louvel asks, ‘Can we have a united response?’, seemingly inciting a collaborative reaction. A voiceover from Louvel’s collaborator, Paul Kendall, reminds us that ‘we were not always an island’ and ‘we can expect [Britain] to be reconnected [to the continent] during future glacial periods’. We are thus prompted to consider the impermanence of things to which we tend to attach much importance and the relative insignificance and inconsequentiality of our politics. Does Brexit actually matter, then? I think Louvel suggests that it does, and yet equally, it really doesn’t. She asks repeatedly on the album track of the same name, ‘Where is the border?’, inducing questioning in the listener, but the incantatory nature of the phrase (chanted rather than sung) simultaneously somehow renders the very issue of borders meaningless.

There’s something of the spiderweb about Louvel’s music, a delicate strength, its interconnecting threads spinning lines articulating and linking us to the past and to Louvel’s own experience of that ancient coast and interpretation of it. Antoine Kendall-Louvel’s throat singing on several of doggerLANDscape’s tracks alongside Louvel’s fragile, searching vocals suggests deep, primeval roots bound with these delicate yet powerful strands of connection. One thinks of those long-ago submerged converging river systems, reemerging in Louvel’s sound-relief. There is something atavistic in the foregrounding of the human voice in various guises throughout the album—this was our first music and the most essential. In ‘Understand the Landscape’, Louvel states, ‘I used a human voice’, outlining her mission to understand and articulate topography. Accordingly, she uses the human voice even for percussive parts penetrating lingering vocal textures on the album. At times, Louvel’s voice conveys exposure to changing light, tides, and elements, almost becoming lost in swirling winds within a sparse electronic soundscape. Sound is reduced to fundamental components evocative of wind and water as the listener is taken above, beneath, within the waves. Haunted by a past and a separation, Louvel ‘Extend[s Her] Arms Across the North Sea’ and sculpts a lost world in sound, her drawn-out vocal generating a real sense of physical stretching out in this particular track. The need for and existence of physical connection with landscape (and, indeed, water) is touched upon again in ‘We Are One Land’ and ‘Doggerland DNA’ in which Louvel teases out our most elemental parts and considers ancient ‘genetic mutation’ alongside yearning for an ‘ancestral home [which] is now underwater’. Here, Louvel makes a strong allusion to attitudes about identity and how we define it, inviting a polemical question: to what extent (if any) have we learned to think differently due to geographical separation? And how does an answer fit with Louvel’s appeal for a ‘united response’?

In her meditative pursuit of connections, Louvel maintains a dialogue with her audience in which she encourages questioning. In ‘Anthropological Travelogue’, the album’s final track, Louvel states that she wanted to explore her relationship to landscape and asks the listener, ‘What is your relationship to the continent?’. From a contemporary perspective, we are urged to consider the ways in which political union and landscape are distinct yet correspond. We might also ponder whether our visceral attachment to land is generated by its physical qualities or by our concept of what it means in terms of ownership, connections, borders, territory, power, and freedom. Linked to this is the question of thinking itself, how landscape shapes it, and the effects of borders and free movement on our ideas.

Given doggerLANDscape’s core conflicting concepts of expansiveness and boundaries and its exploration of roots and shifts, there is something of an appropriate paradox in Louvel abruptly closing the album with the line ‘we had a wonderful walk’. Perhaps, as a metaphor for our little lives, that’s all any of us can ultimately aspire to. Presented as a spoken-word journal entry describing Louvel’s expedition to Lincolnshire to seek the remains of a primordial forest, ‘Anthropological Travelogue’ contemplates arriving and leaving. Louvel’s repeated ‘leave nothing but footprints’ acts as an entreaty and simultaneously bequeaths a fittingly equivocal image of both legacy and progress represented by the human journey across land and time. In the album’s penultimate track, taking her audience back 8,200 years to the moment when a tsunami claimed much of Doggerland (‘if you were standing on the shoreline on that day’), Louvel inspires empathy, creating a personal connection between the listener and the events of the past. She conjures a moment in history, a place in time, yet her message is both timely and timeless. ‘We must be careful with the tide’, she warns in ‘Anthropological Travelogue’, signalling the fragility and strength of our connections and the diligence with which they must be upheld. doggerLANDscape poises us on a shoreline between life and death, preservation and devastation, wedged somewhere between geological time periods and different worlds. We are, of course, neither fully separated from nor fully connected with what is Over There, any more than the There of history or the There of what is to come. We are, in fact, on an island called The Present, so much smaller than the unfathomable Past and inconceivable Future, yet so close to both. We must make the best of our situation. We are Here.

 

Links: 

doggerLANDscape | Olivia Louvel | Cat Werk Imprint (bandcamp.com)

'Doggerland Channels' (sound art installation, 2022, 2023) — :o: (olivialouvel.com)

'doggerLANDscape' (2023) by Olivia Louvel on Vimeo

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